


One for sorrow

by lilith_morgana



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-24 04:40:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16633118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: Eileen sings to her baby in Azkaban.





	One for sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Migrating some of my ancient fics over here, slowly but surely. HP was my first fandom and most of what I wrote back then won't end up here but some of it will. 
> 
> This was written a couple of days after The Half-Blood Prince was released, as a form of therapy for all my FEELS. It was popular at the time because we all had them FEELS. Obviously not perfectly in sync with canon but hey.

_**MA** : [...] Has Snape ever been loved by anyone? _

_**JKR** : Yes, he has, which in some ways makes him more culpable even than Voldemort, who never has. _

(excerpt from interview)

…

 

An omen of the Approach of some terrible Thing … is the Chattering of a Mag-pye.

BOURNE;  _ Antiquitates Vulgares _ (1725)

 

* * *

  
  


Eileen is born in March. A few years later on her birthday, Lord Halifax speaks to Adolf Hitler about the future of Europe. This is nothing she knows anything about until much later. She knows, however, of Grindelwald, and of unspeakable acts in every street corner. Her mother tells her to cover the windows and sit quietly under the table whenever Eileen is left home alone. After a while it’s not frightening anymore, but exciting. She brings books with her to her hide-out, books and candles and sweets. Sometimes she imagines how one of the bad men enters her home; she would step out of the dark then, of course, and fight him. Her magic is already quite good at the age of nine.

Her uncle Roger supports Grindelwald. They don’t speak of this. Eileen remembers that she used to sit in his lap and listen to his voice –  _ five for silver six for gold you know the rest, lassie _ \- but her mother tells her they will not be seeing uncle Roger anymore. For months, Eileen imagines that Roger is the bad man entering her home. She always wins over him, too.

 

\- - -

 

Usually the Princes are Ravenclaws. Usually they excel at everything without effort and never receive proper credit - unless the condescending air in their common room counts as credit - and Eileen is not like them. This is what she tells the Sorting Hat, too, that she does not intend to remain under her table now that she’s all grown up. She is sorted into Slytherin after a minute or so, and walks to the others with a tickling bubbling sensation in her belly.

She will like Hogwarts. No, wrong, she will  _ love _ Hogwarts. Hogwarts agrees with her essence, her very core, and she spends seven years in bliss. It has nothing to do with the other students; they are boring and uninterested in her. It has everything to do with the subjects, the professors, the endless lines of books in the library. Eileen decides that she must work near the books,  _ always _ . Decides that she must become a professor.

Her mother smiles vaguely as she mentions this at Christmas.

 

\- - -

 

One summer when Grindelwald has been gone forever and Eileen grows two inches, she visits Muggle Dublin with her parents. They do this sometimes, live as Muggles for a week. She learns to like that way of constructing life; she is fond of their pragmatism, their practicality. She is even fonder of its absolute contrasts.

When they visit a real Muggle church, she listens to the words and translates them into an understanding in her mind. Consolation, she thinks, it’s all about consolation. It’s fascinating how much consolation they need, really.  _ Miserere, Miserere, I was shapen in iniquity. _ They wouldn’t teach her this at Hogwarts.

 

\- - -

 

Eileen leaves Hogwarts with the best marks anyone has ever had in her two favourite subjects: Potions and Arithmancy. It’s the logic that appeals to her, the mathematics of magic. She knows she is not the kind of witch the wizarding world holds in highest regard – she is bad at defence, her Transfiguration skills are limited and she will never master duelling. When the autumn comes, she applies for a position as a potions lab assistant in Knockturn Alley; she rents a small place nearby and tells herself in the mirror that it’s time to let go of impossible dreams.

In the afternoons she washes the chemicals off her skin and hair, thinking it’s almost as good as books.

 

\- - -

 

Her mother, on the other hand, thinks she ought to marry. For Eileen’s twenty-fifth birthday her parents hold a party, introduce her to sons of acquaintances and friends. All of them charming, none of them able to catch her interest for long. She knows it’s mutual. Eileen is not beautiful or happy; she is sullen and sardonic, built like a too-skinny boy.

“I would like to study stochastic variables as employed by Arithmancy,” she tells one of the guests – a short blond man with grey eyes. He looks so terrified that she keeps talking for another half hour. Wine brings out her dark humour.

 

\- - -

 

She moves to the North as the lab she works for is closed down. They hire her only for a few months wherever she turns, and for a while it does not bother her. She’s a single woman – they all seem to know or expect this – and has no roots. She can move as it suits them.

The wizarding area of Halifax is very small; they tell her this is a good thing. Sawbridge’s Potions Supplies has two visitors per week, and Eileen endures hour after hour of time she can use however she wants. When she locks the doors and heads home, she is often bored out of her skull, watching the tiny village spread in front of her. In her rented place, the memories lurk but she must learn to overcome them. That is how life goes. She thinks she’s heard someone say this to her, once. Instead of counting sheep, she counts memories – piles them upon each other, beside each other, turns them into long rows of towers and pinnacles. Or chimneys and broken roofs.

 

\- - -

 

Sometimes she visits Muggle pubs because she misses the holidays from her childhood. She combs down her hair over her shoulders, puts on a dress and sits in a corner until someone speaks to her. It doesn’t happen every night but then again she has no such expectations. The music is nice; she can hold her liquor well. Behold, she thinks after a few pints, the plain girl’s capacity for appreciating the mundane.

Tobias Snape is a tall, dark man. The miller’s seventh child and the only son in a family made up of tall dark, sour-looking women. It’s like something out of a folk tale.

Tobias is kissing her outside her flat and she keeps thinking  _ I’m breaking my own heart _ and also  _ stop being such a frigid cow _ , because that’s what she does. She thinks in contradictions. She throws her arms around his neck and wonders how she can parry the disappointments without Expelliarmus.

“It’s raining,” he mutters into her hair but what he really means is of course  _ let me in _ , so she does.

The morning after she catches him staring at her Potions equipment on the shelf in her bedroom. He doesn’t say anything. She offers tea but he must leave for work, an awkward kiss on her cheek later.

 

\- - -

 

Lack of first-hand experience can be a fatal flaw in well-read people, Eileen finds out as the usual monthly event doesn’t arrive. It’s her fault, of course. She should have used the potions she sells for a living, but it’s much easier to run other people’s lives, so she didn’t.

She has the antidote ready after a few days; she holds it in her palm for an hour and throws it out with the garbage when the contractions and contradictions in her body are too strong, too much. A brief note to Tobias, because she feels it would be expected of her in a situation like this one.  _ I’m having a child. I’m sorry _ . Her mother has very few words to offer, as far as both comfort and insults go.

“I suppose times are not so dark for halfbloods anymore,” she says before she pops out of the fireplace and leaves Eileen alone, again.

 

\- - -

 

“And all these things, what are they?” Tobias asks when he has bowed enough before his father’s screams of  _ oh no, you bloody mishap, there is nothing to discuss and there will be a wedding _ and returned to her. He means her possessions and she is insecure of how to respond.

“Do they bother you?” she asks instead.

“People will talk.”

 

\- - -

 

They marry in private, her parents are not invited, and only one of his sisters has taken the time to show up. Eileen receives a cold handshake. Tobias looks away as they walk out of the chapel.  _ Miserere, Miserere. _ She begins to understand the Muggles.

It’s crowded in the place that became her new home; you can see people’s faces and dreams as if they were your own. In the damp bricks, on the rain-wet streets you can hear all the muffled screams behind the neutrally coloured curtains, read all the swollen prayers for something else rising from worn alleys, worn humans, a grief swallowing life itself. Eileen thinks this is good. It humbles her to do what must be done.

In every tale, there is a Trial and the sound of a snapping wand is thick and fast, the supple wood giving in too-easily. It’s over in a second.

Tobias looks so relieved when she hands him the pieces that she can’t bear to tell him about wandless magic.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


**Two**

  
  


For the first two months of her pregnancy, she craves the strangest things. Earth, metal,  _ fire _ – the doctors tell her it is not uncommon; they give her pills and tell her to eat more meat. They have complicated names for simple conditions and this one is called pica. A craving for the peculiar.

Eileen sings to her baby. Pica pica, my little magpie.

 

\- - -

 

Her husband is too good for her. She knows that somehow this is her fault. In a soon-to-be-abandoned factory works a woman who walks past their window every night, as if waiting for something. Eileen talks to her once. The woman is large and heavy and her moves are slow. She is very pretty, built nothing like a boy.

“He was supposed to marry me,” she says.

“Oh,” Eileen responds. “But he didn’t.”

Her husband drinks far too much. She knows that somehow this is her fault, as well. They whisper about her outside on the cobbled streets between the worn-down houses; they say she is a witch, they say she used her magic on her husband; they say the child she carries is the Devil’s. Eileen holds her head high and summons rats to their kitchens, puts curses on their food.

She will never let herself forget that the Muggles used to burn women like her.

 

\- - -

 

Eileen quits her job when she becomes a Snape; her credentials all praise and  _ best of luck in the future _ . In October, she cleans the new house, a cramped place with a fitting name – Spinner’s End. Tobias calls it a stroke of luck that they found somewhere to live at all and she refrains from mentioning that they could have lived in her flat. She plays chess with herself during the days, praises her own ingenuity, and celebrates her victory with tea and Muggle-made scones. In November, she prepares the nursery upstairs. Her potions lab has its own corner there; Tobias will hardly use this room anyway and she doesn’t trust Muggle medicine. Concealment charms are possible without wands; she is prepared for it all.

Their first Christmas she spends with her old Arithmancy textbooks while Tobias is at the pub. It doesn’t matter to her, she stands outside for a bit around midnight and looks at the sky, thinking. Thinks that the baby’s breathing is enclosed in her, just like she is enclosed in the tired facades around them. Thinks that perhaps this is what mathematics teaches you after all – how every distance is pulverized in an infinite number of spots until it can be enclosed, understood. The infinity present in one big step. She puts her hands over her unborn everything and wants him to feel it.

She always knew it would be a boy.

 

\- - -

 

Eileen gives birth at home despite Tobias’s protests –  _ nobody does that anymore _ – and does it quickly, as if it wasn’t painful or complicated. It isn’t. He is named Severus after her father, Bernard after her father-in-law. It’s a very small boy according to the midwife, but he will grow with time, like infants do. They tell her this like one explains things to children – in large letters. Eileen nods and takes him in her arms.

“Pica pica,” she murmurs with her mouth against the soft skull, already dark-haired. “That is the Latin name for magpie, did you know?”

Eileen sings to her baby about magpies.  _ One for sorrow, two for joy. _

 

\- - -

 

“Will he be… like  _ you _ ?” Tobias asks when Severus is two and spends most of his time building towers with his toy bricks or tearing the filling out of his stuffed animals. He’s a silent well-behaved boy, makes her proud whenever she must take him outside to the other mothers. The only thing that makes him cry is too-hot food, and even then he seems to quell the urge to make noise. Tobias shouts if he is too loud, Eileen thinks their son has already decoded that unsubtle language perfectly well.

“Time will tell,” she says and knows that it’s not what he wishes to hear.

Tobias hates her for not understanding the importance of Severus’s magical inheritance. He hates her for not understanding unemployment and working conditions and for suggesting a move.  _ We have no money! _ He hates her for letting him go to the pub every night, for slipping mild poisons in his tea when she is upset with him, for hexing the women who gossip, for telling his sisters they can take their cold handshakes and rot in hell.

“We could live off  _ my _ money if you’d let me work in the potions shop,” she says and hates him, too, for not agreeing.

 

\- - -

 

Eileen is happy she never pretended to love Tobias, grateful because then she might have missed the truth, a truth that this whatever-it-is with him is just a small fact in her life. A semicolon between definitions known to no one, a footnote nobody reads.

The boy in his bed, the tiny dark-haired ungraceful boy who invokes in her all the love she could wish for. She sits with him at night sometimes, watches his features in sleep, inhales his skin, his scent, lets herself be fascinated by the fragile shell around his heart. With her fingertips she traces the palms of his hand, pale against the sheet, traces his barely visible lifelines until they branch down in the delta around his wrists.  _ I love you _ she thinks and  _ I would change the world for you, if I could. _ .

For the first time sentimentality comes naturally to her.

 

\- - -

 

When Severus is five he helps her with the potions she sells in secrecy. Eileen gives him orders and he obeys, chops roots and cuts up herbs for simple decocts and as she lets him stir, he looks up at her with his eyes glittering. He has no friends. It doesn’t surprise her; their world is not embracing, that’s one thing Tobias has made her understand. Guilt by association, and she has brought the unspeakable shame over her family already.

“Like this, mother?”

“Yes,” she says every time because he always gets it right. “Exactly like this. One more clock-wise stir, then you may add the mandrake.”

Tobias thinks the boy should be outdoors. Takes him and places him there, too, when he is home.  _ You’ll bugger his head up with your witchery. _ He buys a football one weekend when he is remarkably sober and forces Severus to practice until it gets too dark to see. At supper, he complains about weak legs and useless mind-set and how he _ bloody well has to grow a spine if he wants to survive out there. _ Eileen mumbles hexes until he sleeps at the table and then she teaches Severus how to summon books.

 

\- - -

 

“How can you be so cruel to him?” she asks Tobias once. They are sitting in what he refers to as their living room, while Severus is doing his homework in the kitchen. He has problems with the math, Eileen has explained to him so often he doesn’t listen anymore and decides he is better off without her help.

Tobias pretends to read the newspaper until she has posed the same question five times. Then he looks up, directly at her. It is the first time in many months they have looked straight at each other, and it strikes her as odd that the only thing that brings them together is conflict. Perhaps this is how it goes, for all married couples. She doesn’t claim to have any expertise. “They’re  _ laughing _ at him, Eileen.”

 

\- - -

 

“It’s your fault,” Tobias says a few days later and throws the Hogwarts letter to the floor. “You’ve been teaching him these things!”

“Yes,” Eileen says and he never hears the different tones of her voice, the quiet contempt. “I made him magical. That’s exactly how it happens.”

“I’m a wizard?” Severus asks, his face lit with pure joy. “A real wizard?”

That evening marks itself as the one when he first tells Tobias to  _ sod off _ and Eileen catches a terrible streak of hardness at the bottom of his voice. It aches against her for a long time.

 

\- - -

 

When Severus leaves them for the first time Eileen can’t feel her own breath in the air on the way home, stops inhaling and exhaling because she’s afraid it might break her. In their house later at night, when Tobias is out somewhere, she walks around in the holes of their existence, thinking she was wrong about how small it was the first time she saw in. She knows now that it can never be small enough, because nothing can fill it up.

She no longer possesses any patience with her unappeased desires. She bends around her own emptiness in the double bed and thinks she could throw up. Tobias returns at the break of dawn, rolls over to her side to touch her like he sometimes does when he is too drunk to care that he doesn’t want her. She pretends to be asleep.

"I'm not a bad man, Eileen," Tobias says in her head from time to time. She knows it's the truth but it doesn't matter.

  
  


* * *

 

**Three**

  
  


Eileen visits her parents for months when Severus is at Hogwarts. She doesn’t await their offer, she flees on a train and ends up in their lounge with tea and chess and her father who grumbles about the curse of mixed marriages. She stays until they quietly throw her out with their silence.

She’s not a martyr. It’s not in her blood. She  _ tries _ to divorce Tobias, many times. He has shown her enough of his world for her to know how to go about it, what measures to take. It’s not that. It’s never that, never a lack of knowledge. It’s the promise they once made. Eileen believes in promises. She wants to teach the whole world the importance of keeping its promises, regardless of how much the world lets her down. Sometimes she thinks she is the only idealist left. Sometimes she laughs into her morning tea-with-vodka and thinks the only person she’s fooling is herself.

 

\- - -

 

They send her a letter from Hogwarts in which they explain that Severus has hexed a fellow student so violently that the boy was sent to the Hospital wing for a week with spasms in his body. Eileen reads this as Severus returns home after his first year and sits on his bed, his school books in his lap. He has no words for her, nothing about the school year, nothing about the professors she knows and loved. He watches her with suspicion as she sits down on the floor beneath his bed.

“Why did you hex him, darling?”

“Because I hate him. He destroyed my potion and Professor Slughorn said I needed to write an essay when I hadn’t done anything wrong!” his eyes are hard as he looks at her. “I  _ never _ do anything wrong in class, and I’m much better than that idiot!”

Eileen wants to stroke his hair away from his eyes but knows he would never let her. “You can’t hex people you dislike, Severus.”

“Why not? That’s what you’d do.”

 

\- - -

 

They act their marriage during holidays – a perfectly rehearsed pantomime that holds no substance – and live apart. Tobias doesn’t like to make a fuss about things, prefers it the way it is as long as she never disturbs him. So she doesn’t. Her parents assist her in finding a little flat in the wizarding area again. It takes roughly two minutes. Halifax will never be the hot spot in their universe and for the moment, Eileen could not be more grateful. She can’t have her job back because Sawbrigde’s Potions Supplies has moved to London, but she can still sell her draughts on the black market.

For Severus’s birthday she buys him the best cauldron she can find thinking  _ you’re my only promise left now _ . He sends her a letter a week later and says ‘thanks, but I bought one in Hogsmeade recently. You need this better than I do.’

Eileen puts the cauldron on a shelf in her bedroom. Perhaps it should have been the one with silver handles instead.

 

\- - -

 

When Severus is fourteen he calls her filthy.

“You’re disgusting!” he proclaims one day when Tobias has fought with him for a good hour upstairs. “How can you be married to  _ that _ ?”

“Severus,” she says and tries to put her arms around him like she used to. She remembers  _ pica pica, my little magpie _ and  _ like this, mother _ ? Time has not changed her, but it has taken him. It hits like a curse.

He flinches. “Don’t touch me.”

“The boy isn’t right in his head,” Tobias says in their bedroom later. “I’ve tried to tell you that since he was a baby.”

 

\- - -

 

She borrows Severus’s wand one morning when he is still asleep and Apparates to London to meet with one of the officials at the Ministry who tells her she can sit down and have a cup of tea before she explains her situation. Eileen thinks tea will not help when her son finds out what she does here, and denies. She returns home that afternoon with papers in her hand.

“I’ve notified the people who need to know,” she explains to Severus. “They know I’m not practicing magic in this house anymore. If spells are cast in here they will register it.”

He doesn’t say anything when he snaps the wand from her and slams the door to his room.

Eileen thinks later, years afterwards, that this is when she knew how it would end.

 

\- - -

 

Eileen goes to her mother’s funeral alone. It’s a cold day in October and her father presses her hand for the ceremony, so passionately she wonders if he will be capable to endure another day. Her parents loved each other and it seems strange to her now, strange to even think about it. Sixty years and they  _ loved _ each other. Her father cries like a little boy beside the tomb; she must lead him back to his seat afterwards.

“My mother died,” she tells Tobias at Christmas.

“Oh, I thought she died years ago,” he says and Severus glares at him over the table.

The next day Tobias has leaking boils all over his skin and Eileen sends Severus to bed without food. She has done what she can do, it will never be enough and she cries in the bathroom, hoping to be heard.

 

\- - -

 

Severus is fifteen when he returns from Hogwarts and talks about the Malfoys for the entire summer. He has a friend now, called Lucius, and Lucius’s father works for the Ministry of Magic, unlike Tobias who recently got a job in the factory. Eons of difference, Eileen understands. She listens and nods when she thinks it’s expected, smiles a little at Severus’s enthusiasm.

“Why don’t you invite your friend over for a weekend?” she suggests when he has finished his story about the Malfoy Manor filled with amazing magical things and how good Lucius is at Defence Against the Dark Arts and how he already has a good job for the Ministry despite his age.

Severus only stares at her before he starts laughing. Eileen hasn’t heard him laugh before and the empty, dark echo of it crashes against the walls of her heart.

 

\- - -

 

Time, Eileen thinks, is something she hasn’t understood at any point in her life. It doesn’t fit into her, she can’t get around it. She adds years to years and watches her child grow up but she can’t feel it in her bones, can’t work out the equation. Once she thought she would be somebody else if she ever married and had children. Now she knows she is still the same, but the rest of it is different. Tobias grows calmer every year, as if the violence and temper within him ages too, transforms into weariness. He has work from time to time and Severus does not concern him when he’s away. Eileen lives her own life and stops by to see how he is when she thinks it’s been a long time without any news. Mostly he isn’t at home so she leaves notes tucked under the door.

_ Severus wrote. He passed his O.W.Ls with very high marks _ . Or:  _ Severus wrote. He’s staying at Hogwarts over Christmas. _

Time, Eileen thinks, will never end. That is what she doesn’t understand in her life filled with endings.

 

\- - -

 

When Severus is sixteen he doesn’t come home for the holidays. He sends a letter telling them he will stay with the Malfoys in France. Tobias has nothing to say and Eileen picks up her remaining belongings and moves them into her flat.

She makes a lot of money that summer and spends it all on herself.

 

\- - -

 

Eileen sits in her bedroom and decides she will move to London in a few years. For some reason it calms her to think about it.

 

\- - -

 

It is a last effort now and she wants to make it good. It’s the summer before Severus’s seventh year, the one he has agreed to spending with her because she has talked about nothing else for the past three months and he hates her nagging. He is so grown-up, she thinks, when he drops his bags on the floor and steps inside. Tall, dark, serious-looking like his father, like  _ her _ , and hesitant to give her a hug.

It is a last family dinner, almost mythical in its structure. A colourable truce until the raised voices begin to outshine the perfectly prepared meal, until Tobias picks up a trace of discontent in something Severus narrates from school and Eileen tries to go between them, as she is used to do. Tobias smacks the beer down on the table and shouts at her, causing Severus to scream even louder.

Eileen closes her eyes.

 

\- - -

 

“Don’t  _ touch _ me! If you take one step closer I swear I’ll bloody well kill you.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know! Why don’t you tell me,  _ father, _ like you always do?”

 

\- - -

 

Eileen thinks that it’s amazing how sometimes time is on a different side than your own, despite the fact that you’ve been thinking you know how to conquer it, lately. Amazing how time can stand still as well, nothing moving, curtains stiff in the breeze, every scream drowned in its own silence. What happens is such a small thing – a minor detail, actually – a moment of calmness in a raging storm that already has torn the house from the ground. One word, one she has never heard before.

“ _ SECTUMSEMPRA! _ ”

Tobias hits the wall before he crashes down to the floor, his chest open.

She’s not a martyr. It’s not in her blood. But Eileen believes in promises and she made one seventeen years ago when she decided to have a child. In their living room in the silence, he is still her child and it’s not a decision as much as a fact etched into her essence.

“Give me your wand, darling,” she says – her own voice sounds peculiar in her ears, it surprises her how calm it is - and uses it to clean Severus’s face, his hands.

“It will be all right,” she says when they listen to the noise increasing in the fireplace. Eileen hurries to open it for the visitors. Severus doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, his hands are still clutching the wall, as if he thinks he will fall down if he lets go.

"No," he says eventually. It sounds like it's coming from a distance far away, his face still broken with shock. "No, you  _ can't _ ."

“I  _ love _ you,” she says the second before the first Auror steps into their home.

Eileen follows the Aurors without protests as they leave twenty minutes later, Severus’s wand still in her hand.

 

\- - -

  
  


Eileen sings to her baby in Azkaban during the nights, when the other prisoners are wailing and the Dementors are swooping across the corridors. She sings about magpies and at times she can feel her son in her arms, not as a shadow but as flesh and blood, crawling up to her. There are many things she wants to tell him.

He only comes to visit her once and she knows by then the exact number of days since she last saw him. It’s carved on the walls, in her skin, a long line wrapped around her consciousness. It has been years, Eileen knows, and he is nothing like he was when she left him.

“Look at you,” she murmurs because it’s the only thing she can say. He stands in front of her cell, kneels down slightly to be able to look at her and in his face she still sees the shatter of the boy he will always be to her. All the memories stored in his body, and she wonders if he has found a way to release them, if he is strong enough to let them go. As if he can read her mind he shakes his head. His hands on the bars, his face pale against their steel and she thinks  _ you’re my only promise left now. _

“Dumbledore took me to see you,” he says quietly.

She tries to reach out to him, make him touch her. “I know. He spoke to me earlier.”

At that, Severus sinks down to the floor completely, his face no longer a mask but something else, something she hasn’t seen in him for so many years. He leans against the bars and she comes closer. Her fingers are dirty on his pale skin, she keeps thinking she ought to wash up but he holds them there, firmly in place.

"So you work for Dumbledore?" she says and it's not a question but he seems to think it is, the way his eyes shift before her.

"Yes."

Something washed-out in his gaze, something tearing at the surface. He's made her sentimental, not  _ stupid _ and she can feel all the terrible things he has ever done pulsate through his skin into her own blood. It changes nothing. The outcome will always be the same; his wand in her palm,  _ my life for yours my child. _

"I knew you'd make me proud, Severus." There is a crack in his composure at her words, a gash of darkness, a wound torn up. Eileen imagines that she brushes with soft breaths and fingertips over it to make it whole again. She knows, too, that it's beyond healing and this stings in her far worse than anything he has done.

“I'm afraid you’ve always been wrong about me, mother.”

“No, Severus,” she says and leans in to rest her forehead against his. “I’ve never been wrong about you.”

 

\- - -

 

Eileen sings to her baby in Azkaban.  _ Five for silver, six for gold. _ Severus says nothing when she wraps her hands around his hair, strokes his cheek.  _ Seven’s for a secret never to be told. Eight’s a wish, nine’s a kiss. _ He buries his face in her skin, made harsh and callous by the endless months in this cell but it doesn’t matter now.  _ Miserere, Miserere. _ Nothing matters now that he is here.

 

Eileen sings to her baby.


End file.
